Recently I started retro-fitting the MeLikeDrinks.com drink website to cache frequently used data to improve performance, as such I wrote a light, custom cache API which sits on top of PHP’s Memcached API. Because I follow TDD principles, I wrote out the tests first, which helped me write out the API calls needed to support the application, but when it came time to actually get the memcached service on my CentOS box, I ran into all sorts of confusion, which motivated me to write this article. It is my hope that this article will help alleviate any confusion others may face when they decide to dive into the cache pool.